Monday, 14 September 2009

Capturing those thoughts

Why do you scrapbook? To play with pretty paper? To have somewhere for all those photos? To capture memories? To look beyond what is on the photo? To express your creativity? Or a bit of all of those?

I scrapbook for all these reasons and also more. I scrap for me, for the me time it gives me. I scrap because I have always been keen to look back and reminisce. And I love it. It is really the hobby I was waiting for all my life - or at least, many years!

Coming back from our short holiday in Switzerland, I knew that I had a few pages in mind and with the motivation from Challenge 50 I got straight down to it. I don't profess to be any kind of artist. My layouts are not going to win any prizes but they tell my story and that is what is so important. I often have typos, handwriting errors and even wrong grammar but that is usually because I am so keen to get the story down.

Take the layout below - 10 Years (#35 in Challenge 50) - I was so busy writing my thoughts down without preparation, that there are some major grammar errors - but you know what? It's SO not important. 99% of all my layouts are just for me and even if I put them on this blog, I know that there is a limited viewing audience.

This second layout has very minimal journalling (just noticed that I even have the date wrong here - should be 29th August!), but I know that this is just one of several layouts I will do about this special weekend and I will probably do one with the full story.

And this one? # 37 in Challenge 50 is just a place to highlight one of my favourite "me" photographs. Can it possibly be 20 years ago? Was this one of the first photos of me laughing? Did I honestly create that beautiful dress? Was I really ever that slim? Probably questions for another layout!

And all three layouts broke open yet another old, unloved, neglected kit. So glad to see it being used up. You really don't want to know how many more of these I have!

*shameful downward glances*

I have actually also created Challenge 50 items #'s 38 to 41 but I can't share those ;-)

Only 9 more to go to hit 50. I think I will probably extend it to 100!